French painter Francis Picabia is best known as an early pioneer of the Dada movement. Between 1915 and 1917, he lived periodically in New York where he was active in the New York Dada group. There he met Alfred Steiglitz, Man Ray, Walter Arensberg and Beatrice Wood, among others. Picabia was involved with a number of Dada publications, including '391'. He traveled between the New York, Zurich, and Paris Dada groups taking ideas from one place to the others.

Francis Picabia was born in Paris in 1879 into a family of mixed parentage with a French mother and Spanish father. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and at the École des Arts Décoratifs of Paris. Up to 1908 he painted landscapes in the m...